The $1.8 trillion US trade 'surplus' that Trump's not talking about

By Kevin Hamlin

13 June 2018 — 3:53pm

The US has a surplus of $US20 billion ($25 billion) with China and $US1.4 trillion ($1.76 trillion) with the rest of the world.

That's not a normal trade balance, of course, where the US registered an annual deficit of more than $US330 billion with China and about $US550 billion with the world last year, but an "aggregate sales surplus" which measures both direct trade and the sales of multinational companies, according to research by Deutsche Bank.

President Donald Trump says US have been ripped off by its trading partners.

Photo: AP

Just looking at the goods and services trade deficit is misleading and doesn't capture the true size of US business interests, according to Deutsche Bank economists. While trade and corporate data aren't usually combined, if you add up all trade data, sales by US companies in foreign countries and foreign firms in the US, "US companies have sold more to the rest of the world than other countries have sold to the US in the past ten years," writes chief China economist Zhang Zhiwei in the report.

President Donald Trump's determination to rein in his nation's trade deficit has put him at odds with the developed world, a stance that undermined an acrimonious G-7 summit in Canada at the weekend. China and the US are meanwhile locked in negotiations to stave off a trade war, with Trump threatening to slap tariffs on at least $US50 billion in Chinese imports after June 15.

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For China, the image of a massive trade deficit with the US "is at odds with the fact that Chinese consumers own more iPhones and buy more General Motors cars than US. consumers," wrote Zhang in the report. "These cars and phones are sold to China not through US exports but through Chinese subsidiaries of multinational enterprises."

Instead of a growing trade deficit with China, Deutsche Bank estimates there was a small but growing surplus. The increase reflected rising demand of Chinese households for foreign goods and services, driven partly by the wealth effect of China's property boom. The sales surplus with China may exceed $US100 billion by 2020 if the world's two biggest economies avoid a trade war, Zhang estimates.

The US also ran sales surpluses with nations including Mexico and Canada but had deficits with Japan and Germany last year, Zhang wrote.

Not all analysts are convinced Zhang's method is useful.

Former US Treasury official Brad Setser says Deutsche Bank is comparing apples and oranges.

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"Looking at aggregate sales -- summing exports with in-country sales by firms that have invested in China -- creates far more problems than it solves," says Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "The sales data is useful on its own, but summing it up only confuses things. It doesn't provide a particularly useful way of thinking about trade."

What the sales data does show is that the interests of US firms aren't always the same as the interest of US workers because American firms can profit from growth abroad without exporting from the US and employing US labour, he said.

"Gross sales tell us something about the global position of US-owned firms, and China certainly will look to retaliate against US firms on their operations in China if the trade war spirals out of control," he said.

However, any retaliation against firms in China may also have an effect at home. That is because the success of those firms overseas provides a boost to the US economy and also partly explains why unemployment is lower in the US than in its major trading partners, according to Zhang.

Deutsche Bank used data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to estimate overseas sales of US companies through 2015. For more recent sales it turned to multinational companies in the Standard and Poor's 500 Index that provide sales reports broken down by country and used those to estimate overall sales by American companies in 2016 and 2017.